I’m marching because I live in a sweet ground floor apartment in NYC, and the folks behind us just built a four-story glass box addition to their brownstone that juts towards our courtyard and practically my bedroom, too. They have not one, but three balconies that no one ever uses.
I’m marching because the sight of the tired, the poor, the hungry carrying dirty placards asking for handouts on the two train does not yet fail to pierce me, a Midwesterner transplanted here midlife, though I have learned ― like all the New Yorkers ― to avert my eyes.
Because I’m tired of reading and signing and reading and signing online petitions from the Bold Progressives that I’m not sure anyone will ever see or care about.
Because I had worked ringing doorbells — both times — for Obama, yet I could never find the time or energy to do that for Hillary.
Because a tangerine tufted misogynist is about to become our next president.
Because the day after the election, I went as usual to teach my class at Barnard, made up of immigrants, and the daughters of immigrants, foreign students and girls of color. I happen to have many Muslim girls in the class this year. Samaha and Haifa and Hajira and Nasreen and Kania and Sanjida, too. We put aside Dante that morning, and when I asked them how they were feeling, Hajira couldn’t speak, but only cried, and Haifa told the story of her friend in a hijab being barked at that morning on the train, “You should take that off. You’re in Trump’s America now.”
Because the look on my 23-year-old daughter’s face, the night after Trump won, told me I had to get moving.
Because every Monday I ride 45 minutes on the Q line, from Manhattan to Brooklyn, to see our first and only granddaughter, age 1. When the train emerges from the tunnel and climbs up into light and sky, the edges of the city, the harbor, the waters, are all spread before us, offering an invitation to hope and dreams. Possibility — one that belies the list of Trump nominees, the billionaires and cronies and Sessions, too, a whole gang of thieves whose fundamental character flaws and histories and voting records have everyone around me either anxious or depressed, or both.
There’s a speck out in the water there, as the train climbs the Brooklyn Bridge, a silver lady holding something in her hand, and I rise each time to salute her. She’s the reason my grandparents journeyed here, from Belarutka and Poland, too. She’s the thing with feathers so many have been willing to give their lives for. And I’m only asked this: to wake on Friday at dawn and face the traffic to DC, to lace up my sneakers on Saturday and march.
Because our future, embodied by a one-year-old child, a Jewish girl named after a Sufi poet, Rumi, waits on the other side of that bridge. She is not really waiting — I simply imagine that part: that my presence looms as large in her small life as she does in mine. She is just now tasting language and can say two words: Ba and Ma, a kind of high note question in each syllable, more like the note of a song. She is wonder and possibility itself. And I worry over the planet I’m handing to her—the sorry state of its oceans and skies and rivers.
I’m marching because I watched our current president give his farewell speech in Chicago last week. There was a moment where he stopped addressing the Big Things and looked down, into the crowd of 20,000 packed into the hall, centering his gaze on his wife’s face. Tears, almost, as he stared at her, unable to speak. I didn’t hear much more of what he said. Something about gratitude, about how she built a White House that welcomed everyone. All I could think was, What a man. What a person. What a human being.
How in the world do we move from that — to this? He told us how. He reminded us that we are citizens of this potentially great nation, and of the world, too. Just before watching Obama’s farewell address, I had screened “Requiem for the American Dream.” Chomsky ends the documentary with my teacher, Howard Zinn’s words: “What matters is the countless small deeds of unknown people who lay the basis for the significant events that enter history.”
So, on Friday, my daughter Anielle and her girlfriend, Lily, and me, will get in the car and drive south to DC. We march for all of the women and the men, too, who can’t get themselves there: the guy with the dirty placard on the train, scores of incarcerated people of color, my student in the hijab who couldn’t form words and only cried, my granddaughter and all the granddaughters and grandsons, too, waiting in the wings.
We march against the sorry state of things. We march because this pen, these words, will only take us so far. We march because someone has to say No. And Yes.
